The news cycle can seem like a never-ending weave from one crisis to the next. This year alone the media, Congress and public have trudged along a path of scorn over Goldman Sachs, Toyota, Tiger Woods, Massey Energy, Facebook, Israel, BP, Gen. McChrystal, and Apple, with a few other stepping stones in between.

"A veritable deluge of crises since 2008 has shown that crisis PR is no longer up to the job ... all these combustions would have been fixed, in the good old days of 2007, with a call to Burston-Marstellar or Sitrick & Co. A swift beat-down on the forces of negative narrative would have ensued. The accepted wisdom was that you didn’t want to be on the other side of a Mike Sitrick counterattack. Crisis PR wasn’t just effective. It was feared.

"But now, the new crisis paradigm is spinning hopelessly in the dark. By mid-2010, the stories were changing too rapidly to control, much less revise. Like a violent postmodern vortex, the bad news sucked down all who struggled to escape it. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is to blame. But it goes beyond the 24/7 news-and-comment cycle, and forces the PR world to confront something far more disruptive—and something that will undercut its $700-per-hour fees."